People contort all kinds of ways to describe a really original writer, but Big Machine is an amazing piece of work. A true American Gothic ‘horror’ in the vein of Poe, or Melville or James — this book is authentically scary, compulsively strange, and hugely exciting on the sentence level. It’s also funny as hell. A riff about the Washerwoman cult, who rewrite the Bible in bizarre contemporary idiom, is worth the price of admission by itself.